


interplanetary fall

by wrishwrosh



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Telescopes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-15 15:39:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19298704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wrishwrosh/pseuds/wrishwrosh
Summary: Every one of JT's problems has an equal and opposite problem.In which JT Compher does not embark on a journey of self discovery.





	interplanetary fall

**Author's Note:**

> for mood, please listen to the perfume genius cover of can't help falling in love.

 

JT isn’t super involved in the LGBTQ Student Association, for a lot of reasons. He’s really busy right now, for one thing. He signed up for intramural hockey league during freshman orientation, along with astronomy club and Students For Animals, which turned out to be more of a vegan kind of thing. But hockey practices take up more time than he thought they would, and with those plus schoolwork, JT is pretty booked up.

Plus, the LGBTQSA meetings are nothing special. JT skipped the first meeting for hockey practice and the second one to study for a test, and when he finally went to the third one it didn’t seem like he’d really missed anything. The icebreakers were dumb too. JT doesn’t know whether he, as a person, is more of a bell pepper or a broccoli. When they introduce themselves around in small groups, the girl next to him says she’s pansexual and looks at him really expectantly, and his mouth kind of freezes up until he says he’s an ally, all rushed and weird.

The whole meeting, he finds himself zoning out and staring at the other people in the room, wondering if they’re staring back at him the same way. They probably are looking at him, because the lecture hall where they hold the QSA meetings is kind of circular and you can’t really help looking at the people across from you. They probably aren’t staring like JT is, with a mingled sense of paranoia and fascination. His chair is kind of squeaky, so he sits still as a rock the entire meeting.

He hasn’t been back.

+

Back when JT was in high school, his mom got really into visualization and the power of positive thinking. Stuff like, if you devote energy to something, you can bring it into your life. If you think about something enough, it’ll come true.

She bought a bunch of self-help books with smarmy titles and took up meditation and whenever JT bugged her, she would close her eyes and say she was visualizing herself a beach house. It was never anything she took too seriously.

JT doesn’t like to admit how much sense it all made to him. It seemed like an easy fix. Just a little mental discipline, and all of his problems go away. So, he didn’t think about it. He never looked anything up. He never so much as watched that one fucking Cheerios commercial with the lesbians if he could help it. He didn’t want to invite anything into his life.

He sort of knew then and he definitely knows now how stupid it all is. Refusing to think about it made him unhappy, and it never did shit to make him straight. However, not thinking about it did mean nothing in his life really changed. Pros and cons.

Obviously, that strategy was stupid and now he knows better. JT is really, really trying to be an adult about this. He’s trying to broaden his horizons and be his true mature self and all that shit. He’s an adaptable guy. He just didn’t expect it to still be so hard.

+

Around the middle of October, JT starts seeing the flyers everywhere. They’re printed out on colored cardstock and decorated in glitter glue with stars, hearts, and doodles of what might be bats. Whoever was in charge of distributing them was clearly very enthusiastic, and when JT sees four of them on the way to his 9 AM Econ lecture he finally caves and stops to read one.

“COME CELEBRATE HALLOWEEKEND WITH THE LGBTQSA’S 7TH ANNUAL DRAG BALL,” it advertises, above a picture of a pumpkin with eyelashes. “COSTUMES HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. ADMISSION $5, BRING ONES TO TIP.”

JT considers. It could be fun. It would definitely be horizons-broadening. It seems like a good way to really commit to being himself, or whatever. He snaps a picture of the flyer then shuffles along on his way to suffer his way through another 50 minutes of basic microeconomics.

JT puts the flyer and the drag ball entirely out of his mind for about a week, until suddenly it’s the Thursday night before Halloween Saturday and he’s alone in his dorm with nothing to do except lie upside down on the bed with his heels up on his Bulls poster. He casts a wide net of texts and snaps looking for something to do and then just sits for ten minutes, fucking around on Twitter while his phone stays stubbornly silent. In the end, nobody responds except the intramural team’s backup goalie, with a blurry snap of a crowded room but no address.

He sighs and lets his head fall back over the edge of the mattress. Alexander’s bed is empty across the room, as usual.

JT knows he’s lucky to have a chill roommate. A couple of the guys he’s met have had horror stories about roommates that never leave or steal their shit. JT is pretty sure Alexander’s a really cool guy, which is great. He’s in the library so often it’s almost like JT has a single. He doesn’t need to be BFFs with his roommate anyway. He’s got other people. It’s fine.

He’s resorted to scrolling through his photos, looking for duplicates to delete, when he sees the picture he took of the drag ball flyer.

He could go to that. There’s nothing stopping him from going to that. He could, in theory, have a nice time. It’s probably time for him to turn over a new leaf: it’s JT’s understanding that people are supposed to challenge themselves in order to grow. Sort of depressing that going to a school sponsored event at 9:30 on a Thursday is such a big fucking challenge, but JT already pretty much knows that he sucks.

He digs through his wallet until he can scrounge up seven crumpled ones, throws an Ice Hogs sweater on over his hoodie, and heads out. He’s running mostly on adrenaline.

The giant glitter-glued poster just inside the doors of the student center directs him downstairs, so downstairs JT goes. The stairwell deposits him in a damp basement hallway echoing with the sounds of heavy bass and loud conversation. There's maybe ten people in line outside the theater, and everybody is wearing elaborate costumes. JT spots what he guesses is a sexy Hulk standing next to some kind of bondage-themed witch. He shoves his hands in the pockets of his khakis and joins the line, trying to look completely unobtrusive and completely comfortable at the same time. Who wears fucking khakis to a drag show? JT Compher, that's who.

When he gets to the head of the line, the kid sitting behind the cash box looks him up and down and blinks.

“What's your costume tonight?” he asks.

JT plucks at the hem of his jersey. “Hockey player, I guess?”

The kid shrugs. He's wearing really elaborate skeleton makeup, and JT can't really read his facial expressions. There’s a nose piercing glinting under all the paint, and JT tries and mostly fails not to stare at it.

“That's defensible. I'll give you our special costume discount tonight, but you better really bring it next year, okay?” He holds a hand out, and JT fumbles his wad of cash. “Four dollars, babe.”

He passes over the money in exchange for a sharpied X on the back of his hand and goes inside the theater.

The atmosphere isn’t stellar. From what JT understands, the LGBTQSA is pretty small, so the event got stuck in some dinky basement theater where only the really awful improv groups perform. It smells faintly like old HVAC and piss and they're all sitting in folding chairs, but somebody hung up a bunch of rainbow flags and flags in other colors that JT only faintly recognizes, there’s a runway carved out of the middle of the floor in flashing LED lights, and everyone appears to be having the time of their fucking lives.

JT is ten minutes early, but the place is already packed. There’s only a handful of seats still free, and bigger groups are starting to lean against the wall at the back of the room. JT weaves through the crowd and settles in a chair at the end of a row two thirds of the way back.

The energy is infectious, but JT’s still tense. He resists the urge to tap his feet to the beat of the Ariana Grande song blasting over the speakers. If he stays very still, maybe no one will notice him. He feels like one of the rabbits he and Jessie used to chase in the yard. No matter how still they sat, they never looked like rocks or stumps or anything other than rabbits. The crowd is pulsing, but JT tries not to move.

The guy next to him is very, very good looking. He’s dressed as a superhero, with a weird shaped mask over most of the upper half of his face and a mass of brown curls on top of that. On second glance JT figures out that he must be Mermaid Man, complete with a shell bra and the kind of shiny leggings that JT has only seen on girls at space-themed frat parties. On third and fourth glance JT returns to the leggings. This is the kind of glancing JT wouldn’t have done in the past, but right now there’s literally a rainbow flag thumbtacked to the ceiling above him. No shame, he tells himself. Time to quit dipping his toes in and commit. Fuck it. He doesn’t want to be creepy or anything, but he doesn’t need to be repressed either.

JT bites the inside of his cheek and decides to keep looking, only to make direct eye contact with Mermaid Man. The guy raises an eyebrow and smirks at him, and JT’s face goes blushy and hot just as all the lights in the theater go down and the music goes up.

JT honestly has only a very vague idea of what to expect from a drag show. He once watched half an episode of Drag Race by accident, drunk in somebody’s basement in high school, but he mostly just remembers being confused and unsettled as long as it was on. At the time, it violated his policy of never asking any questions about himself or anything else. So when the first performer whips off a robe to reveal a bedazzled jumpsuit and struts down the center aisle lip syncing to Rihanna, he’s a little shocked.

The show is chaotic and rowdy, and JT can’t help but get swept up in the atmosphere as the crowd whoops and cheers. Fortunately he’s mostly too distracted to be incredibly aware of the way he occasionally brushes knees with Mermaid Man, but that is also happening. Hands go up in the audience around him waving cash, and he remembers the three ones he still has in his pocket.

He fishes them out and rubs them across his leg to uncrumple them a little bit before sticking his hand up in the air only a little tentatively. The current performer is between songs, slinking around the outside aisles of the theater with a mic making jokes about people’s costumes. JT gets distracted laughing about a crack she makes at the expense of some kid behind him dressed as Guy Fieri, and despite the fact that he’s been holding cash up in the air plenty long enough to get noticed he still jumps when a long-nailed hand runs through his hair.

“Well aren’t _you_ the cutest,” coos the drag queen, who is suddenly wrapping an arm around JT’s shoulder and plucking the cash out of his sweaty fingers. JT wonders briefly who she is. She could be a student, she could be in one of his classes. He wouldn’t know. “Who are you dressed as tonight? A straight boy?”

JT has never been more keenly aware of a pair of khakis. The audience cackles. JT sweats.

She leans over JT and gasps. “And look who’s next to you! Look at this sexy superhero!” Next to him, Mermaid Man smiles and lifts a hand. “Oh, are the two of you here together? Mm, I hope you are. I’d watch that.”

Over the background beat and the crowd’s laughter, Mermaid Man shakes his head and mouths, “We don’t even know each other.”

She fakes a swoon, tossing a hand over her eyes. “They’re strangers! That is such a shame, oh my god. Y’all should hook up,” she says, matter of fact. JT can’t help snorting at that, faintly mortified. He hazards a glance over at Mermaid Man. Mermaid Man is looking back at JT, smirking. Or maybe it’s not so much a smirk as a kind of crooked smile. He raises an eyebrow—the other one this time—and JT has to look away.

The rest of the show passes in a haze as JT practically marinades in a weird combination of humiliation, confusion, and mostly suppressed delight. Somebody at a gay event thought JT looked good. Somebody thought JT would look good, more specifically, with another dude. JT doesn’t know whether he wants to lean into the feeling or run straight out of the theater and never come back. A correction: he knows what he wants to do, but he also knows what he should do.

After the show JT wanders through the crowd and out of the basement still mostly in a daze. He crosses the lobby and is practically out the door when someone taps him on the shoulder. JT turns around and standing there, in all his tights and glory, is Mermaid Man. The starfish mask isn’t actually a mask at all. It’s a shape drawn on the guy’s face with purple marker, which JT hadn’t noticed before, maybe because he was too embarrassed to look the guy in the face for more than a second at a time.

“Hey,” says Mermaid Man. “I’m Tyson.”

“Oh, cool,” says JT, like an asshole. “I’m JT.”

“Nice to meet you, JT.”

“Cool costume,” JT says, with a vague gesture towards Tyson’s chest that he immediately regrets.

“Thanks, you too,” says Tyson, and JT swirls internally. He isn’t even really wearing a costume.

Tyson grins and leans towards JT like he’s about to tell a secret. “So, sorry if this is weird. But I feel like getting hassled by a drag queen together is a bond we shouldn’t ignore.” He fishes a phone out of some previously unseen pocket in his sparkly leggings and waggles it in JT’s direction. “Wanna trade numbers or something?”

“Yeah, dude, for sure,” says JT, who can apparently only say completely meaningless shit right now.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket and swaps it for Tyson’s, putting his name in as JT From The Drag Show with three fire emojis. Tyson passes JT’s phone back over when he’s done, brushing JT’s elbow with the outside of his arm as he does.

Somebody shouts Tyson’s name from outside the doors. Tyson jumps, sticks his phone back in his waistband, and says, “Sorry, I should probably head out. It was great to meet you though, JT.” He starts towards the doors, still mostly facing JT.

“You too, bro. Have a good night,” JT says with a wave. He could swear Tyson’s wearing glitter on the tops of his cheekbones, mixed in with the marker, but the lighting in the student center lobby is shitty anyway.

“See you around,” Tyson says before he disappears out the front door. JT exhales, releases his death grip on his phone, and starts back towards his dorm.

JT is decent at making friends, generally. He’s a pretty friendly guy. He gets the idea, though, that Tyson didn’t take his number as a just-buddies thing. He doesn’t really know what to do with that.

+

He thinks about texting Tyson. He really does. He also kind of knows why he doesn’t.

Tyson doesn’t text him either, so that’s that.

+

Honestly, JT sort of forgot he signed up for astronomy club. At this point, he’d assumed it was a joke and wrote it off. But now here they are in his email inbox, advertising a meeting at 11 PM on the roof of a building JT has never been to.

This seems like a ‘why the fuck not’ situation, which JT’s elected to be into now. What else would he be doing on a Wednesday night a week after midterms? Why shouldn’t he go hang out with some strangers on the roof of the physics building? Maybe he’ll learn some astronomy.

So JT jams a beanie on his head and leaves the comforts of his room to trek across campus to the physics building. At first, he thinks the email was a prank, because the physics stairs only go to the fourth floor and there’s no clear way to get to the roof among the offices up there. When JT finally discovers the ladder to the roof in the back of a janitor’s closet, it's already 11:15, but he climbs up anyway.

Somehow, he expected to see more than three dudes in folding chairs. They’re facing away from him, circled around a single small telescope at the edge of the roof. This seems a little informal, but what does JT know. They do have a telescope, so he nuts up and shuffles over.

“Hey, sorry I’m late. Is this, uh, astronomy club?”

The guy in the middle freezes, turns to the chair on his left, and says “Fuck, Dawg, I told you to bring an extra chair.” He cranes his head around to look at JT. “Sorry, buddy. We were really not expecting anybody new to show up to this meeting.”

“Maybe if we didn't have meetings on the fucking roof in the middle of winter,” says the third guy.

“Well, you're welcome to try and focus a telescope through a dirty fucking window, then, dude. Fuckin’, spiderwebs. Handprint grease.”

“Okay, anyway, welcome to astronomy club, hope you don’t mind sitting on the ground,” says the guy who apparently forgot the chair. “I’m Nate.”

The other two introduce themselves as EJ, Nate’s co-president, and Tys, social chair.

“You can be vice president if you want,” says Nate. “We've never had enough club members to have one of those before.”

“No, we definitely have enough people, but you two dipshits couldn't just agree on one president,” says Tys, waving JT over.

They rearrange their chairs so there’s enough space for JT to sit on the ground in front of the telescope. The cement is so cold it feels wet through JT’s sweatpants. Or it might just actually be wet. JT can’t tell.

“So, like. What do we do here?” JT asks, shifting from side to side to see if he can make the ground more comfortable. He can’t.

“Astronomy,” says Nate. He consults a notebook balanced on EJ’s knee and spins some unidentifiable knob an eighth of an inch. “Lookin’ at the sky.”

Tys leans back in his lawn chair. “Just let them do their thing. Sometimes they argue about parallax for fifteen minutes, sometimes they show you something cool.”

JT’s ass is going numb, but he doesn’t have anywhere else to be and he wants to see something cool, so he tucks his hands under his knees and lets the conversation swirl around him as EJ and Nate very gently wrestle with the telescope. JT gets the sense that these guys know each other very, very well, but somehow he doesn’t feel like an outsider. Occasionally one of them leans over and asks JT a question about himself or explains. Nate takes issue with one of the numbers in EJ’s notebook and Tys uses their distraction to point constellations out to JT until EJ yells at him to keep his liberal arts Greek myth shit out of their science club. It’s surprisingly chill. JT relaxes, as much as he ever does.

“Come check this out, new guy,” says EJ, after he and Nate seem to have reached some kind of equilibrium with the telescope. Obediently JT levers himself off the ground and toddles over on icicle legs. He leans in to press his face to what he assumes is the eyepiece but is actually just a regular knob that happens to be located where JT feels like an eyepiece should be. EJ redirects his head to a different knob and says, “Look for the blurry thing.”

At first everything is a blurry thing. JT squints, trying to jam his eyeball closer in the hopes that the field of fuzzy black will resolve itself into the promised something cool. Eventually he starts to see distinct pinprick stars and between them, a soft edged white slash.

“I see it,” he says.

“That’s another galaxy.”

“Shit,” is all JT can think to say. Shit.

+

By the time JT makes his way down from the roof and parts ways with the guys, it’s a little after midnight. He’s ambling back to his building, enjoying the cold night air now that he’s not sitting still and freezing, when he sticks his hands in his empty pockets and realizes in a flash that he left his ID card in his room. This is what he gets for not taking one of the little phone case pockets that the DGs were handing out. He’s locked out, and the campus is pretty much deserted.

He makes it back to his building and circles it, but nobody’s around. He’s about to give up and see if he can go sleep on one of the couches in the marketing department lobby when he sees a guy in a hoodie passing on the other side of the street.

JT dives into the street after him, calling out, “Hey! Excuse me, hey!” and the guy turns around and it’s Tyson from the drag show, who JT has not contacted and who has not contacted JT.

“Oh, hey,” says JT, a little breathless from the cold and the weird adrenaline. “Shit, what are the odds?”

“Are you okay?” Tyson asks. He seems wary, which is fair, because JT just practically fucking chased him yelling down the street in the middle of the night.

“Sorry, this is weird, but could you let me into my dorm? I had a late club meeting, left my ID somewhere, it's—sorry.”

Tyson is looking at JT like JT is insane but he’s probably gonna go with it anyway, which is promising. He shrugs, nods, and follows JT back down the street towards the front door of his building.

Neither of them says anything as they walk side by side down the sidewalk, which makes JT almost itchy with a desire to break the quiet. JT’s by no means chatty, but he dislikes a silence. He has a bizarre urge to say, y _ou didn’t text._ Which, JT didn’t text either. He doesn’t even know why he’s thinking about it. Instead, he blurts, “So what are you doing out here so late?”

Tyson kind of chuckles, and pulls a bag of gummy worms out of the pocket of his hoodie. “The vending machine in my dorm is broken. I really wanted some candy.”

“Respectable,” says JT as they reach the door, which only counts as a response in that it is technically a word. Everything sucks. Everything sucks and is weird, including and especially JT himself. He puts his hands in his pants pockets.

Tyson swipes his ID once, twice, three times, but the little light on the card reader stays stubbornly red. He frowns at his card, turning it over in his hand, and then laughs, tipping forward into JT’s shoulder. “Oh shit,” he says. “You can only get into your own building after, like, eleven.”

JT snorts. “Thank god somebody was paying attention during orientation.” Tyson’s head is on his shoulder. He takes his hands out of his pants pockets and puts them in his jacket pockets instead, which feels somehow more neutral.

JT leans away to look through the window, taking his hands out of his pockets entirely to cup them on the frosty glass and look inside. The stairwell is deserted. He knocks experimentally, but it stays empty. “Fuck,” he says. “I guess that means I just have to wait here until somebody comes in or out. At two in the morning. On a Wednesday.”

“I think it’s Thursday now, technically,” offers Tyson. When JT turns to look at him, he’s standing on the step with his hands shoved in his armpits, smiling with all his teeth.

“Fuck off,” says JT, smiling a little. It probably looks weird. His face is pretty cold and the smile pulls strangely at the chilled corners of his mouth. “Thanks for trying, I guess. I’ll let you get back to your night. Pray I don’t freeze to death.”

“I’ll wait with you, if you want. I’d feel shitty just leaving you here in the middle of the night.” JT wasn’t even fishing, and the offer sort of surprises him. He feels a little bit bad, but not bad enough that he’s totally willing to sit alone in the dark for who knows how long until someone lets him in. He shrugs, sits down, and pats the pavement next to him.

Tyson sits down, close enough that his shoulders brush JT’s, and offers JT a gummy worm. JT accepts. It’s only after he does that he realizes the situation he’s just created for himself.

“So,” JT says, biting off the green end of the worm and diving in, “Tell me about yourself, or whatever.”

Tyson sputters a laugh around a mouthful of Trolli. “That’s, uh, a little broad.”

JT laughs. It’s probably a little too loud for the time of night, but oh well. Maybe someone will hear him and come open the door to investigate. He feels knotted up, but also like someone is undoing the knots. “I don’t know anything about you, dude. Just making conversation.” That feels a little blunt, or maybe it came across as cool. JT doesn’t fucking know. Every one of JT’s problems has an equal and opposite problem.

“I’m from Edmonton. I’m a kinesiology major. Any joke you have about how easy kinesiology is, I’ve already heard it.” Tyson holds on to a severe face for a moment, and JT bites back the three instinctive cracks about how easy kinesiology is. But then Tyson comes out with a sneaky little smile, and says, “I mean, unless you have some actual original material.”

None of JT’s material is original. “You wouldn’t be able to handle my best work,” he says.

“Copout,” Tyson says with a cheerful shrug.

It’s really, really easy to talk to Tyson. JT’s never been the type to cling to anyone he’s ever said two sentences to, but somehow this doesn’t feel the same. JT’s also not to the type to make things easy for himself, but fuck it.

“You said you had a late club meeting,” says Tyson. “What the fuck kind of club meets at midnight in the middle of the week?”

“Astronomy club, actually. They kinda need the dark for that.”

“That's really cool.” Tyson looks impressed, which makes JT feel a tiny bit of weird burning pride. “So you’re, like, a star expert? Show me something incredible,” he says.

“Nah, I'm still new at it. Tonight was my first meeting, so I know pretty much nothing.” JT doesn’t want to lie about his astronomy knowledge, because that way lies madness. But then Tyson nods and shrugs and looks away. Not even in a disappointed way, just like he’s accepting the end of this thread of conversation. JT’s heart skips anyway. He wants Tyson to keep looking at him.

“I can still show you some stuff if you want?” JT says. “Like constellations or whatever.”

Tyson nods, so JT focuses on the sky. It's a lot harder to spot anything interesting without a telescope and an expert or at least a STEM major next to him pointing them out. He doesn’t even know what general area of the entire sky the galaxy was in. He's worried that Tyson might be getting bored, but then he spots some familiar stars.

“That's Pleiades,” JT says, tracing the constellation with his finger. He leans closer in towards Tyson’s side so Tyson can see where he's pointing. “That little cluster.”

“What’s that mean?” Tyson asks.

“I can’t, like, translate the Greek or anything, but it’s also called the Seven Sisters. I mean, usually you can only see six of them, but apparently if you look at it right you can see the seventh.”

Tyson tips towards JT, tilting his head around and squinting his eyes. His hair brushes the side of JT’s face. “I think I got her,” he says.

“Supposed to be lucky, I think,” JT says. “Good for you.” JT hasn’t been able to see the seventh star, no matter how he focuses and unfocuses his eyes on the constellation and the darkness around it. He doesn’t bother to try again now.

“Good for me. Keep it coming, I wanna see more stars.”

JT obliges. He leans even closer, until he can feel Tyson’s chest rising and falling against his shoulder, so he can point out the North Star and Orion’s Belt. “Shit, that’s pretty cool,” Tyson breathes.

“Yeah, isn’t it?” JT says.

It’s a cold night. The pavement underneath them is kind of re-freezing JT’s ass, which only barely warmed up on the walk back from the physics building, and whenever he inhales his nostrils freeze a little bit. His breath and Tyson’s form one white cloud. The whole side of his body is warm where Tyson’s leaning against him.

“JT? Tyson? What the fuck are you guys doing out here?” says a sudden voice. JT looks up, and Alexander is coming down the walk.

“Oh, ‘sup,” says JT.

“You two know each other?” says Tyson.

“Yeah, we’re roommates,” JT answers. “What are you doing out at this time of the night, Alexander?” he asks, as though Alexander’s ever usually in. As though JT’s the kind of guy who chats casually with his roommate.

Alexander squints at them where they’re huddled on the doorstep. JT leans away from Tyson, shuffling a little along the step. He decides not to think about why he’s doing that, because he already knows. JT’s a little ashamed of the instinct, but apparently not enough to override it.

“The library just closed,” Alexander says. He shifts his backpack on his shoulder.

“So busy, Kerfy,” Tyson drawls. Tyson is close enough to Alexander to call him Kerfy. He won’t even let JT call him Alex.

“You should probably be busier, Josty,” Alexander shoots back. “Why are you two out here?”

“JT got locked out. I very nicely agreed to wait with him, but now you and your valid ID are here, and everybody can go to sleep.”

“Why didn’t you just go back to Tyson’s?” Alexander asks, as mildly as he says anything else.

JT turns to look at Tyson, who just blinks. “Uh,” JT says. “Didn’t think of that.”

“What’s done is done,” Tyson says with a shrug.

“What’s done is you two just sat out in the cold for a thousand times longer than you needed to,” says Alexander, digging through his bag and pulling out his ID.

“Well, thanks anyway,” JT says.

“Anytime.” Tyson stands up and reaches a hand down for JT. JT takes it, and Tyson pulls him up off the step and then keeps pulling until he has JT in a weird little half hug, his arm around JT’s back and their joined hands resting on his shoulder, their sides pressed together. It’s not really any closer than they were sitting before, but JT is thrown.

He stands perfectly still, trying to figure out if this is normal, if there’s some particular way he’s supposed to be reacting. He wouldn’t be so weird if this were one of his buddies from home. JT isn’t that repressed or desperate, probably. But this hug feels just a little more charged, maybe because he and Tyson got introduced by a drag queen and just spent fifteen minutes talking in the dark and looking at the stars together. Clearly, though, the thing he was supposed to do to make it normal wasn’t freezing like his fight or flight response kicked in, because Tyson’s arm tenses for a second and then slips away.

He takes a half step away from JT and lowers his arm to his side. “I’m gonna head back to my room now that you’ve been rescued. Have a good rest of your night, I guess.”

JT nods, feeling like a useless bobblehead. “See you around, bud. Enjoy the rest of your gummy worms,” he says, smiling as normally as he can. Behind him, Alexander coughs sharply, opening the door with a flourish. JT twitches a hand in Tyson’s direction like some kind of weird salute. Tyson returns the gesture, and JT tries not to linger on the way his smile looks a little different than it did before.

He trails Alexander up the stairs to their room, and tries not to think about it.

+

JT is halfway through Econ the next day when his phone buzzes with a text. He checks to make sure the professor isn’t looking right at him before flipping it out on top of his notebook. There are two new messages from Sexy Superhero Tyson Jost. He laughs to himself when he sees the contact name, which gets him a dirty look from the girl next to him. He glances back over at her, hunching over his phone so she can’t see what’s on screen and judge that too.

_hey sup_

_did you make it home safe last night_

JT snorts quietly.

He types, _once i defrosted i did ok lol_ and sends it before he can second-guess the _lol_.

 _it wasn’t THAT cold. weak,_ Tyson responds.

 _ok canada whatever makes u feel better about urself,_ JT says. _im not too tough to admit when im fuckin freezing_

_well im just glad youre ok_

_actually thanks for waiting with me you were a lifesaver,_ JT says, and immediately wishes he could unsend it. It’s a little too sincere.

 _no prob,_ Tyson says. _im gonna need u to venmo me for your share of the gummy worms tho_

So naturally JT looks up Tyson Jost on Venmo and sends him four cents and the caterpillar emoji. They’ve settled nicely into JT’s comfort zone: a complete lack of sincerity.

JT takes a few lines of half-hearted notes while he waits for Tyson to respond. He’s not going to understand them later, but he doesn’t really care.

 _fuck you_ , Tyson says.

 _ur so welcome_ , JT responds.

+

JT and Tyson text now. They snapchat. They’re pals. Lately he has been getting many texts from Tyson, and sending just as many back. They’re friends, or whatever.

Tyson sent JT a shirtless picture one night. He doesn’t think it was supposed to be hot. It wasn’t posed or filtered, just Tyson with gross, stringy post-workout hair, from the shoulders up. From the bare, sweaty shoulders up.

JT is trying not to make it weird. A shirtless picture is normal bro shit, and he doesn’t need to overthink it. Or maybe it isn’t normal bro shit, and he’s already overthinking it anyway.

In a moment of bravery or insanity, he sends Tyson a shirtless picture of him in bed. Normal bro shit, JT sleeps shirtless and he wants to complain about waking up for his 9 AM. Normal.

He includes a little sliver of nipple, because doing it gives him a burning hot feeling of excitement somewhere in his chest. It doesn’t matter. Tyson doesn’t screenshot it or replay it or anything.

+

There’s a particular couch in the library that JT kind of likes. It’s in a back corner of the first floor, pretty much exactly between the bathrooms and the cafe, and it’s tucked away enough that usually nobody bothers him. If JT wanted he could go study at a big table that a bunch of the hockey guys usually snag, but sometimes he likes the quiet a little better.

He kind of thinks of the couch as his couch, in a way. Obviously it isn’t really his. JT can’t reserve it in any way. Sometimes other people sit there and he has to go find a regular carrel somewhere, or otherwise go sit with the intramural team. He’s always a little miffed when that happens, though, because. It’s JT’s couch.

He goes to the library one Tuesday after he eats lunch and before Business Statistics, planning to maybe chip away at a problem set or whatever, and there’s someone on his couch. He prepares to awkwardly reverse course to go see if there’s an open table in the map section, but then he realizes that the couch stealer is Tyson.

“Hey,” JT says, walking up closer. “You stole my couch.”

“Well excuse _you_ ,” Tyson says with a grin, not missing a beat. “This is my office.”

JT dumps his backpack on the floor and sits down on the other half of the couch before he can second guess himself. “Since when? I’ve never seen you here.”

“Since always. See, I claimed it. I made my mark.” Tyson leans across JT’s body to point to the armrest. Sure enough, carved with a ballpoint pen into the wooden arm right beneath JT’s wrist is _TKJ_ with a little open mouthed smiley face. JT never realized how small the couch actually is. Tyson’s knee brushes JT’s as he settles back into his spot, adjusting his laptop on his thighs.

“What’s the K stand for?” JT asks, idly tracing the letters with his thumb.

“Kenneth. As in, this is Tyson Kenneth Jost’s official couch.”

JT laughs. “Alright, I get it. You’ve taken ownership.” He likes to collect these little facts about Tyson. Tyson’s middle name is Kenneth. Tyson writes his capital Js with a line across the top. Tyson is the kind of guy who carves his name into a library couch. Their knees bump again.

“Of course, because I’m a really generous person, I’ll allow you to join me here on my couch.” Tyson stretches both arms out to encompass all the space on the couch, most of which JT is already taking up.

“I think there’s an argument to be made for joint ownership here,” JT says. Normally he would be so done talking about this fucking couch. But not with Tyson. If Tyson wants to joke about the couch for three hours, JT will sit here and banter for the full hundred and eighty minutes.

“Oh yeah?” Tyson says. There’s a sticker on his laptop in the shape of a weird rectangle which JT can identify as maybe a Canadian province, probably whichever one Edmonton is in. There’s also a little rainbow maple leaf, and JT knows for sure what that one means. JT imagines putting a rainbow sticker on his own laptop. He’s never liked the commitment of putting stickers on a laptop, because laptops are expensive and if you change your mind about a sticker you’ll have a little sticker-shaped patch of goo on your laptop for eternity. A little ex-rainbow maple leaf, forever, if he changed his mind.

“My argument is: I like this couch a lot.”

Tyson laughs at that a little too long and hard for the library, but JT isn’t going to quibble.

“What?” JT says, trying and probably failing to keep a straight face. “It’s got a good location, good cushions. All around good shit.”

There’s a girl at a stand-up desk ten feet away looking at them like they’re fucking insane. Tyson ignores her, so JT pretends he’s ignoring her too.

“Okay,” Tyson says, dipping down to rummage around in his backpack. “Okay, here’s the deal, take it or leave it. It can be both of our couch _if_ — _”_ he pauses for effect, brandishing a slightly gnawed-on ballpoint pen with the Office of Student Engagement logo on it. “—you claim it too.”

“Is that your only pen?” JT asks.

“Of course it’s my only pen,” Tyson says. “Do you accept my joint custody offer, or do we need to bring in a lawyer?”

Instead of answering, JT takes the pen. He leans over the armrest, retracing Tyson’s initials with his fingertip. There’s a little bit of empty space right beneath. For a second JT considers picking a different spot somewhere else on the couch, somewhere less close or less immediate. Then he decides to stop overthinking his minor vandalism and writes _JTC_ in the space. He presses hard, going over and over it until his name is carved there permanently in the woodgrain, right under Tyson’s with barely a half inch of space between them.

“Nice,” says Tyson. “Welcome to the couch.”

“I’m honored,” JT says.

For the rest of the conversation until he has to leave for Stats, JT keeps a hand on their initials, tracing over and over all six letters until they’re practically imprinted on the pads of his fingers. JT doesn’t finish his problem set, but he wasn’t really planning on getting it all the way done anyway.

+

It’s stupid that JT’s ridiculous non-problems are keeping him up at night. There’s nothing to be kept up about at all. But then here JT is, staring at the ceiling, counting down the minutes until 2 AM when Alexander will get back from the library and he’ll have to turn towards the wall and pretend to be asleep.

His phone lights up, illuminating the wall next to his pillow. It’s a text from Tyson: _fuck me and fuck this human anatomy midterm_

JT wants to let it sit because he’s too tired to process the exact meaning of _fuck me_ and way, way too tired to engage with the idea of fucking Tyson like half his brain sort of wants to, but he has read receipts on like a chump. So he exhales into his pillow and sends back the most sarcastic frowny emoji he can find. _if freshman anatomy is screwing u over i got bad news about the next three years_

 _jeez no sympathy,_ Tyson says.

_not for kines majors_

Tyson sends a thumbs down. JT rolls over and tries again to go to sleep. It probably won’t work, but he’s gotta do it at some point.

+

JT is chilling in his dorm, with Alexander actually present for once, when he gets another text from Tyson.

 

_yo when you see kerfy tell him i still have one of his good pens_

_he’s such a fuckin wierdo abt his pens haha_

_tell him yourself lol,_ JT responds. Kerfy, he thinks. _why do you have his pen anyway?_

_i lost MY pen so he lent me his pen bc hes secretly a nice person_

_or he wanted me to owe him idk could be either_

Pen doesn’t look like a word anymore. JT looks across their room at Alexander, who’s sitting on the floor highlighting an entire page of a textbook. “Hey, how do you and Tyson Jost know each other?” JT asks.

“We met at QSA, actually,” Alexander responds, gnawing on the cap of his highlighter. “We were on the same crew setting up the Bisexuality Awareness bake sale like, a month and a half ago?”

JT pretends not to be blindsided by that information. “Oh, you do QSA stuff?”

“Yeah, it’s a good way to meet other queer kids on campus. Gotta get that sense of community, or whatever,” Alexander says, without looking up from his book.

JT rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling. He thinks about the guys at astronomy club. He thinks about Tyson, for just a second. It feels like his throat is seizing up. “I, uh, didn't see you there,” he says, studiously casual. “At any of the meetings I went to.”

“Weird,” says Alexander. “I guess we must just have missed each other.”

“Well, I didn’t go to that many meetings anyway.”

“Hm,” says Alexander, placing a neon yellow tab very precisely on the page of his book.

JT feels like his tongue is too big for his mouth, and also like he’s suddenly light enough to float away. He sort of gets now why people have these conversations. There's a pause, and JT still hasn't looked over at Alexander. He crosses his hands behind his head, trying to pretend that this is normal, relaxing roommate small talk. He hears a soft thud as Alexander shuts his book.

“Was that a coming out thing we just did?”

JT lets out a breath. “Yeah. I guess it kinda was.”

“Nice,” says Alexander approvingly. He pauses, then says, “You do this a lot?”

“Uh, nope,” says JT. “Never, actually.”

“Well, I’m honored, I guess.” He can hear a hint of a smile in Alexander’s voice.

JT takes another breath, and then another.

“Cool, happy for you,” Alexander says, breaking JT’s silence. “Are we done with the moment?”

JT looks back over at Alexander, who’s picking at his cuticles sort of pointedly, and feels momentarily very grateful. “This wasn’t a moment. No moments. None.” No moments for JT. None.

“I’m glad we covered so much ground here. Tyson has been genuinely fucking obnoxious about you. He’s been driving me insane trying to figure out if you were, like, straight or dumb or just not into him or what, so hopefully now that we can knock one of those options out of the running he'll leave me alone.”

JT can feel his whole torso lock up, and he knows Alexander can see it.

“Or, I can not mention this to Tyson. If that’s how this is going to go.”

JT flaps a hand in Alexander’s direction. “Don’t worry about it. Just, like. Baby steps, you know.”

Alexander nods sagely. “Baby steps.”

+

Astronomy club doesn’t have a regular meeting time. Instead, club meetings get set when EJ sends an email out on their four-person listserv, usually saying something like ‘no clouds meeting tonight’ or ‘meteor shower tues BE THERE!!!!’ JT goes when he can, which is most of the time. He doesn’t really have a ton going on.

This time, EJ’s summons said ‘11:30 be there be square’ so JT rolls up to the physics building at 11:35. This time there’s a brick with a duct tape label that says PROPERTY OF ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT propping the door open, which is a nice touch. The guys are set up same as always on the roof, three chairs around a telescope. They’ve started leaving a gap in the circle for JT, which he appreciates more than he probably should.

“What, still no chair?” he asks.

“Until Nate gets his shit together and buys a fourth beach chair, this club is BYOC for JT,” Tys says. He’s drinking something out of a travel thermos with a curly straw. JT has genuinely no idea what liquid it might be. From what he’s learned about Tys it could be anything from straight espresso to white wine to chocolate pudding.

“Bring your own chair,” EJ clarifies.

“Take a seat,” says Nate, so as usual JT gets as comfortable as he can on the frozen cement between EJ and Tys. “Today we’re discussing our plans for this year’s Astro Club formal.”

“Which is not going to happen,” EJ says, “because there’s four of us and only Nate is even dating anyone, and his imaginary significant other goes to a _different school_ or whatever—”

Nate squalks. “Shut the fuck up, you’ve met Jo!” He leans over and punches EJ in the ribs.

“Although, we don’t know if JT is seeing anyone, do we?” Tys asks, ignoring the chaos and taking a long leisurely sip through his curly straw.

“Ha. Well, I’m not,” says JT, but he can feel his face heating up. He’s not even lying, but he blushes anyway, and he can practically smell the way all the guys zero in on that detail.

“What’s this? Does JT have a crush?” Tys coos, leaning in and nudging the telescope aside with his foot. Nate dives in and snags it before it can teeter too close to the edge of the roof.

“No. No! Shut up. He’s just a nice person, who I’m _friends_ with.” He pretends not to see the way Tys and EJ exchange a significant look when he drops that pronoun. Fuck. It’s a true statement, though. He and Tyson are friends. They’re two people who enjoy spending time in each other’s company, which is what friends are. There’s no call for significant looks here if, like JT, a person is willing to be obnoxiously literal.

“Do we know him? What year is he? What’s his instagram? I need to look him up.” JT has no earthly idea if the guys know Tyson, and he doesn’t want to find out. He would have thought it would be unlikely for a bunch of upperclassmen in the hard sciences to know a random freshman on the sports management track, but Tyson seems to know a lot of people.

“You don’t know him. Don’t worry about it! Friends!” he says, a little desperately.

“Maybe you wanna be more than friends, though, huh?” EJ says. “How did you meet him? Are you sure we don’t know him?”

“We met—” JT almost mentions the drag ball, but that seems a little blatant, despite the fact that he already let it slip that he might be into a guy. “—We met when I got locked out of my dorm one time. He waited with me until I could get back in.”

“A gentleman!” says Tys.

“You should bring him to a meeting sometime,” says Nate.

“Bring him to the formal,” says EJ. JT imagines Tyson in a suit, Tyson pinning on a corsage. Dancing with Tyson. JT doesn’t really know what a formal is supposed to be like. Given that it’s astronomy club formal, none of JT’s weird prom-fueled fantasies would come true anyway.

JT shakes his head. “Nah, he’s sane, he probably doesn’t wanna come hang out on a rooftop at midnight with you shitheads.” JT is sort of getting whiplash from this conversation. “He does real grown up clubs like QSA and shit.”

“Excuse me,” says EJ, “which ungrateful fucker is now able to put _Vice President_ on his grown up resume?”

Nate leans back from the telescope, where he’s fiddling with some dials that JT still hasn’t learned the purpose of. He’s not a great vice president. One of many things he’s not great at.

“Fuck the QSA anyway,” Tys says. JT’s shoulders tighten just a little bit. He steels himself to say some dumb shit about yeah, fuck the QSA. Maybe he can reel it back in, never talk about Tyson again, do some kind of pronoun fuckery until he can get off this stupid roof and regroup. This is exactly the kind of setback he kind of thought would never happen and also kind of expected at every turn.

“He’s doing an on again off again thing with that Swedish guy on their exec,” says EJ, fake-whispering behind a hand. “They’re off right now, he’s being a bitch about it.”

“Shut up, you know Gabe’s name,” Tys says. “Also, I’m just saying I don’t feel the need to go to a ton of meetings. Especially when that club is run by someone on a power trip, with whom I have a sordid history—“

“—A _sordid history_ , are you fucking with me, just because you two almost fucked in public at a blacklight party—”

“—And the key word there is almost, okay, we didn’t actually.”

Nate raises his voice above the clamor. “Are we having a fucking formal or not?”

The world has not ended, for a second time.

+

JT knows a lot more gay people now than he ever did before. Keeping a tally feels kind of weird, but he’s definitely hanging out with more gay dudes now than he’s ever even spoken to before, between Tyson and Alexander and Tys and maybe more, if JT’s right in his suspicion that Nate’s Jo might be a guy. Logically this should be helpful, but he still hasn’t gone back to a QSA meeting.

+

JT and Tyson get lunch, and all JT can think about is what Alexander said, and what the guys said. Tyson is obnoxious about him. Tyson wants to know if JT is straight or not. JT wants to know what that means. JT has a pretty good idea, but he wants to know anyway.

He decides to focus, to see if he can solve this now while he’s got Tyson right here in front of him. He once googled ‘how to tell if a guy likes you for men’ but didn’t click any of the links, so he’s leaving this one up to his own common sense.

What do people do when they flirt? Historically, JT has relied on proximity and awkward meanness, but maybe that’s not how guys do it with other guys. It’s not like his track record with girls was ever all that great anyway. It strikes JT that he has a sort of before and after situation happening in his life right now. The after, in his understanding, is usually supposed to be better. They roll away the big picture of how the house looked before and behind it is the new house, looking great. You roll away the big picture of JT before he—before, and behind it is a new and improved JT.

He looks at Tyson, who’s sitting across from him at the little dining hall table maybe like a date would. Or maybe just like two dudes sitting at a small table in a crowded dining hall would. Almost on instinct, JT scans the tables around them to see if any other people are doing the same thing. Of course other people are, and it isn’t weird for them to do it. Only JT thinks it could possibly be weird. The after picture looks fine.

Tyson looks up from his heaping pile of spaghetti and gives JT a look. “Are you okay, dude? You seem kinda spacey today.”

“No, I’m fine.” JT thinks fast. “Just, like, classes and stuff. You know.” JT did not think fast enough.

Tyson looks right at his face until JT can feel himself start to blush, raising his eyebrows. “Oh, classes and stuff. Classes got your tongue?” That doesn’t even make sense. JT doesn’t want Tyson to ever say the word tongue again, or maybe he wants to keep hearing it forever. JT wishes he could get his wants in some kind of order for once.

“Shut the fuck up, I can be quiet if I want to be,” says JT.

Tyson just raises his eyebrows. JT has never been one to back down from a challenge, so he dedicates himself to eating his shitty burger in complete and total silence for as long as he can. It’s not very long, because there’s nothing that makes JT’s skin crawl more than a silence.

“Fuck, fine. How was your day. What’s new.”

“What’s new is QSA’s having a mixer with the radio station on Friday. You should come. I mean, if you want,” Tyson says smoothly, like he was waiting for that segue. Tyson is the only person who thinks Tyson is smooth, so JT is a little suspicious.

“That sounds fun,” JT says without thinking about it, because that’s what you say when somebody brings up an event like that. Then he thinks about it a little bit, but Tyson has already said “Cool, I’ll text you the details,” and gathered up all his dishes.

So it seems like JT is going to a party.

+

 _Yo are u still down for the qsa mixer tonight_ , says the text JT gets from Tyson at dinner on Friday. He assumes Tyson is only asking JT that out of politeness. He probably isn’t expecting JT to just bail. So on the basis of that vague assumption about Tyson’s manners, JT finds the strength to reply, _yaaa of course._ He’ll take whatever motivation he can get.

 _dope wanna meet at my dorm at like 10 and go over together? i have the address and shit_ , Tyson sends back.

 _Sounds good_ , JT says. Tyson replies with a thumbs up and a room number. JT’s hands are sweating. He takes two soggy bites of green beans and decides to go home and take a nap.

At 9:30, he peels himself out of bed to stare hopelessly into his closet. He has a sense that he shouldn’t be wearing khakis to this party, but he isn’t quite sure what he should wear instead. All of his clothes are ugly and boring and would look out of place at a party full of college radio DJs. He decides on black jeans and a black shirt, because at least then there’s the hope that he can stand in a dark corner and no one will see him. Plus the jeans are slightly too small and make his ass look decent. He looks in Alexander’s full length mirror and wonders what the honest-to-god fuck he’s doing.

JT second guesses himself a thousand more times on the five minute walk to Tyson’s dorm. It’ll probably be weird that he’s there. He might not know anybody besides Tyson, or he might know a bunch of people, or Tyson might know a bunch of people and not want to talk to JT. The music might be bad. It’s not to late for him to puke or break an ankle or something. But then he’s outside Tyson’s building and slipping into the lobby behind a girl with pink hair.

JT paces down the hall until he sees the door where there’s little cut-paper ice cream cone with Tyson’s name on it. _Tyson J._ , specifically. The ice cream scoop is pale yellow. JT stares at it for a while, trying to gather up the courage to knock. Tyson’s definitely there. Light is filtering out from under the door, and there’s music playing faintly. He shifts his weight nervously, checking his phone one more time to see if it’s actually ten o’clock. It’s 10:02 exactly. Then he hears footsteps on the stairs and doesn’t want to get caught lingering like a serial killer outside Tyson’s door, so he sucks it up and knocks.

Tyson whips the door open almost immediately, beaming. “Hey, you found it, come in!” he says.

“It wasn’t hard to find,” JT says, allowing himself to be shepherded inside. Tyson windmills his arms excitedly in the direction of the doorway, and JT stomps on the little image that pops up in his head of Tyson putting a hand on his back. He crosses the threshold unassisted.

Being in Tyson’s room is weird, exciting in a sort of gut-churning, embarrassing way. It seems to be mostly the same as any other dude’s dorm room: blue plaid duvet on an unmade bed, no rug, smells a little gross. There’s no good reason for JT to feel like he’s doing something strange and illicit by sitting on Tyson’s roommate’s desk chair, but he does.

Tyson bustles around, straightening his sheets and kicking socks under his particle board wardrobe. “We should pregame,” he says. “I don’t wanna leave too late because these things literally always get shut down early, but like. We should drink.”

“Sure,” says JT with a shrug, so Tyson pulls a bottle of raspberry Burnetts off his bookshelf and pours them each a couple of shots. JT watches Tyson’s hands flex as he pours and his throat bob as he swallows. Tyson might be looking back, or JT might be imagining it. He doesn’t want to look too closely at Tyson’s eyes. The shots go down as poorly and efficiently as shitty vodka always does, which is a nice distraction from the whole entire rest of the situation. JT’s whole body begins to pulse.

“I like your pants,” Tyson says. JT’s hand is sticky on his shot glass, which he cannot put down because then he won’t have anything to do with his hands.

“Thanks,” says JT.

+

JT should probably be less surprised when he and Tyson walk into the party and he knows a bunch of people there. Some people he sort of recognizes from the handful of QSA events he’s been to, which makes sense. But Alexander’s here, his dark head drifting through the crowd. The astronomy club guys are there too, dancing in a big group of upperclassmen in the front room. EJ raises a cup in JT’s direction when he walks in, and JT feels a little less tense. It’s not as much of a nightmare as he thought it might be on the walk over.

JT’s been to parties before, but only conspicuously straight ones. This one is different: everyone is wearing weird shirts and several people are drinking out of mugs. He’s not wearing khakis this time, but he still feels a little bit wrong. He’s just not sure about this. But then Tyson offers him a cup, and he knows, at least, how this is supposed to go.

JT is an awful dancer sober, and he’s definitely not any better drunk. Fortunately, Tyson’s on pretty much the same level. The playlist is sort of weird, with a mix of throwback pop and songs JT has never heard. But then Everytime We Touch comes on, and the whole room loses its collective shit, and JT can’t help but get into it.

JT and Tyson jump around, getting pushed close together by the crowd, and Tyson pushes his hair out of his face so that JT can see that his forehead is a little sweaty. The red lights of the party are reflecting off the curve of his cheek, and it makes JT want to touch him on purpose. So he does.

Before he can second-guess himself, he reaches out and drags a fingertip along the line of Tyson’s jaw. His skin is warm and a little scratchy from stubble.

“What was that for?” Tyson asks.

“Dunno,” says JT. “Felt like it.” That’s true: JT has no clue why he did it. So he does it again, reaching out and sliding his whole palm across Tyson’s cheek and up into his hairline. Tyson’s hair is incredibly, unbearably soft. JT is obsessed with Tyson’s hair. It doesn’t feel like anything he’s ever had under his hands before. Is it possible that he’s never touched anyone else’s hair before? That must be his hand feels like this in Tyson’s.

Tyson laughs, either at him or with him, though JT is sort of past caring about the distinction. He just wants Tyson to keep laughing. Tyson reaches one hand up and strokes over JT’s hair, from just above his ear all the way down to the base of his neck. Distantly, JT hopes Tyson thinks his hair is soft too.

They just stand there, mirroring each other, laughing as the party surges around them. Tyson’s hand flexes on the back of JT’s neck. Somebody bumps JT’s elbow as they swirl by, so he reluctantly shifts his hand from Tyson’s hair to his shoulder.

The room is dark and loud and damp and all JT can see is Tyson’s face, moving closer and closer in the flashing light from the disco ball propped up on a bookcase in the corner. Leaning in seems like the thing to do, so JT does it and then Tyson pulls him in closer still by the back of his neck and then he and Tyson are kissing.

For a short second, everything around JT feels bright and joyful and aligned somehow. Tyson is kissing him. JT is wrapped up in Tyson and Tyson is wrapped up in JT. He’s completely bound up in the sensations of Tyson’s hand on his neck, and then Tyson’s other hand, gently, on his hip, and Tyson’s mouth on his. Then somebody brushes up against his back and JT remembers where his is, and he can practically hear the moment crack like glass.

He lets go of Tyson’s arms and twists his hips away from Tyson’s hands. The room is spinning and JT is suddenly aware that he is standing directly in the middle of it, and he can hear his heartbeat over the music, and he just kissed a guy in front of strangers and people who might be his friends and now he might throw up. Everything feels wrong now and he really wishes it didn’t.

He has to leave the room, so he does. He bursts through a cluster of people congregating at the entrance to the dark living room, and then he's in the front hall and out the door into the yard. He doesn't look back, and he doesn't see the look on Tyson’s face.

He's hyperventilating a little bit, and he doesn't want to stumble home drunk and shaken up like this, so he sits on the curb with his feet in the street. Out here, away from the lights and the music and the party’s sweaty, claustrophobic air, he feels like the inside of his head is echoing.

That’s that, JT thinks. He thought about it and he went to fucking meetings about it and now he made out with a fucking dude at a party, and there’s no going back. Very fuck it of him. He can take his after photo now.

He doesn’t think it’s been too long when he feels a touch on his shoulder. He turns, and EJ’s crouching next to him on the sidewalk. “Hey, buddy. You okay?”

JT doesn’t say anything. He just sort of sways towards EJ, who catches him with an arm around his shoulders and pulls him into a weird, uncomfortable hug.

They just sit there for a little bit, EJ holding JT tight and JT pressing his face into EJ’s shoulder. He’s crying, just tiny huffing sobs into EJ’s sweaty shirt. Occasionally, somebody opens the back door and the party rushes out at them across the lawn in a burst of noise and light.

“I’m tired of this,” JT says, finally. His voice cracks. “I’m so tired of it, EJ.”

EJ grunts sympathetically. JT doesn’t know why EJ’s the one who got sent out to deal with him. He feels like Tys would be better suited in this situation, and he says as much to EJ, his voice wobbling.

EJ pats him on the shoulder. “Barrie was macking on his exec boyfriend when you left,” EJ says, and ‘left’ is generous. JT appreciates the discretion there. “So I got deputized.” JT distantly remembers seeing Tys and some blond guy orbiting each other in the kitchen, and that image makes the bottom drop out of his night in a way he hadn’t thought would be possible. He thought he was already at the bottom. But now, to his dismay, he’s crying. So it turns out everything can always get worse.

“Why is everybody else so much better at being gay?” JT asks, without really meaning to. He sounds like a fucking toddler and his head is spinning a little bit from the pressure of holding back sobs. “You have gay friends, EJ. What’s the—what’s the _deal_?”

“JT, bud—”

“Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that,” says JT, sniffling. Part of him wishes he could take this whole night back, which sucks. He was having a nice time before he completely lost his shit. “That was so lame. It’s just that I’m kind of lonely.”

“How about I walk you back to your dorm now,” says EJ.

“Yeah. Let’s do that.” JT smears the grime and tears across his face with one clumsy hand and heaves himself up off the ground.

+

He wakes up the next morning, alone in his room, with a sticky mouth and an ache in his chest. The only things on his phone are a message from Nate asking if he got home alright and four impersonal snaps from his intramural teammates, so he rolls towards the wall and goes right back to sleep.

+

JT has to write a paper. He goes straight up to the second floor of the library without even checking if his couch is open. He needs to focus, he tells himself. Finals are coming up.

He thinks about texting some of his old buddies from home, about something. He even gets as far as reopening an old group text. But then, he thinks, what could he possibly say? They’re probably busy anyway.

He doesn’t text Tyson either, and Tyson doesn’t text him.

+

JT has to drag himself to the last Astronomy Club meeting before finals. All three of the guys were there to see him break the fuck down at the mixer, and they know pretty much all of his deepest darkest secrets at this point, so they probably won’t even want him there. However, EJ promised last time that he would show JT Saturn through the telescope. The very small chance that EJ might let him look at Saturn is pretty much the only possible good thing in JT's life right now.

When he gets up to the roof, the guys are already there as usual. There’s a fourth, empty chair in the circle.

“Hey, buddy,” says Nate. “We brought you a chair.”

“We were almost a thing, I think,” JT says. “Or we could have been a thing, or whatever. Not anymore, probably, but.”

“Oh, wow,” says EJ. “Do you wanna at least sit down in this nice chair before we dive right into the therapy session?”

JT sits in the fucking chair.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “We can just look through the telescope if you guys want.” He pretends not to see Nate and Tys exchange a look over his head. He just wants this to be easy. He wants to stop being the subject of dramatic glances. Given how much everybody seems to like glancing, that’s not going to happen any time soon.

“Yeah,” says Tys, cautiously. “Alright.”

The three of them all bend over the telescope, like JT doesn’t know by this point that it only takes one person to calibrate it, and that Tys doesn’t even know how it works anyway. JT knows they’re all looking at each other again. JT looks at his hands and fights the urge to get out of his chair and lie face down on the icy concrete. It snowed last week, and the greyish remains are still piled up in the corners of the roof. There’s no way the club has permission to meet up here, but that has never been his problem.

Nate clears his throat ostentatiously from over by the telescope. When JT looks up, the guys are all looking at him with what must be supportive expressions on their faces. Like a jury about to deliver a verdict on JT’s stupid breakdown.

“Hey,” says Tys. “You good?”

“I’m fine,” JT says. His breath comes out in a cloud.

“I mean, obviously you aren’t, but okay,” EJ offers, tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair.

JT glares at him. “I could be fine.” That isn’t necessarily what a person who truly is fine would say, but JT feels like he has to make the argument. JT doesn’t really want to make this a referendum on whether or not he’s actually fine. EJ looks like he’d be down to argue the point, so JT looks resolutely at the sky and shuts up.

It’s very quiet on the roof. The guys are all just _looking_ at him. “I’m not repressed or anything. Like, I know I’m gay. I just don’t know what being gay is supposed to be like.”

Tys looks thoughtful, settling back in his chair. “There’s no one particular way it has to go,” he says.

“I know that, I guess,” JT says. “Like, logically.” In addition to the quiet, the roof is very cold. JT cups his hands in front of his mouth, then changes his mind and pins them between his knees. They’re just as cold either way.

JT clears his throat in the hopes that his voice won’t crack. “The thing is, like, I’m supposed to be having some kind of journey of discovery or something right now. And I don’t think that’s happening the way it should.”

“Why, because it didn’t work out with your boy?” EJ asks. “There’s plenty of fish in the sea.”

JT sighs. “He’s, uh, a pretty good fish, though.”

Tys sighs back at him. “Look, JT. I’m no marriage counselor, alright? I can’t even keep my fuckbuddy liking me for more than a week at a time. But I think we might be your mentors now so I gotta say: shoot your shot or whatever.”

Nate, who had to lean over and physically restrain EJ when Tys got to the fuckbuddy part of his little speech, pipes up. “Communication is key, and I’m actually in a relationship so I can say that.”

“Why are you guys doing all this?” JT asks. He’s getting really tired of the worried looks, but they just keep coming.

“Uh, because we like you,” says EJ.

“Anyway, the point we're trying to make here is that you should talk to him, okay? It'll be good for both of you,” says Tys.

“He seems like a nice guy, you know. I bet he’ll be cool,” Nate says. JT reels in the part of his brain that wants to beg Nate if he’s sure, nods, and just tries to internalize the message.

“Now, who wants to look at the fucking planets?”

Saturn looks fake, like somebody taped a painting of Saturn to the end of the telescope. It makes JT feel small in a good way. Like, there’s fucking _Saturn_ , and he’s all stressed about some guy he kissed at some party? There’s bigger shit out there in the world. That feeling wears off pretty quick and then he’s back to square one, but it was sort of helpful for a minute.

+

Tyson is still in his phone as Sexy Superhero Tyson Jost. First, he types _hey bro_ , but bro seems a little wrong in the context, after everything. Whatever he and Tyson are anymore, they’re not bros. _hey can we talk sometime soon,_ JT sends instead.

He waits a few horrible minutes for a text back, putting his phone on Do Not Disturb in hopes that it’ll make him chill and then immediately swiping it back off. Just as he’s considering powering his phone all the way down and throwing it out the window, Tyson texts him.

_Yeah we probably should. Tomorrow night?_

JT has been dreading this, but he suddenly wishes he could see Tyson right here and now. It would be nice to be put out of his misery sooner rather than later.

He sends back a thumbs up emoji and goes to Econ.

+

He and Tyson meet up on a bench outside the student center. JT nods hello, and then there’s an endless moment of quiet before Tyson opens his mouth.

“I’m really sorry, JT. I didn’t mean to push you.”

“Oh my god, please don’t apologize,” says JT, already miserable. They’ve been here for thirty seconds and Tyson is already saying sorry for JT’s own stupid issues.

“I’ll apologize if I want to,” Tyson says with an obviously fake smile.

“No, no way. It’s not your fault at all, dude. This is all me.”

They’re quiet again. JT stares out at the street in front of them. All the people walking out there are regular people with regular problems that they’re capable of solving. His eyes land on a purple backpack rattling with pins, and he tracks that backpack until the person wearing it disappears around back of the sciences complex, and then he just stares at the sciences complex for a little while until Tyson starts to talk.

“Um,” Tyson says. Out of the corner of his eye, JT can see him rubbing the side of his face. “Well, from my perspective I kissed you and then you were so freaked out that you literally left the building and didn’t talk to me for like, a week. So I’m kind of curious how that isn’t my fault, and why I shouldn’t say sorry.” By the end of his sentence, Tyson’s voice is horribly wobbly. There’s a slushy puddle in the dirt next to the bench. If Tyson starts crying, JT is going to lie down in it. Hopefully he’ll get icy mud in his sinuses and die.

JT wishes they weren’t doing this in public. He can’t decide it would be worse if he cried outside of the student center or if he made Tyson cry outside of the student center. They should be doing this indoors, in a quiet dark room with multiple exits. Or maybe it’s better out here where JT has something to look at besides Tyson’s potentially teary face. There’s a bird in a tree across the street, which works. JT doesn’t know what kind of bird it is, because he doesn’t know any bird kinds.

Tyson sighs wetly.

“Oh no, please don’t cry,” JT says.

“Stop telling me what to do,” Tyson snaps. “I can’t cry, I can’t apologize, what can I do?”

JT looks over at him, finally, and Tyson’s face is a little red and his hair is a little sweaty. “Are you okay?” JT asks. “I mean. If you want something to do you could tell me how you are.”

“I’m okay. Like, worried, and sad and shit, but mostly okay,” Tyson says. “How about you?”

“Doing better than I was, honestly.” JT’s tongue feels like a rock in his mouth. “So the bar isn’t that high.”

It’s a chilly evening. It really was very dumb for them to meet on a fucking park bench. Their breath is coming out in barely visible clouds.

“I’m sorry.” JT swallows. He doesn’t dare look over at Tyson. “I have no idea what I’m doing and I fucked it up with you and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to do it the right way, and I’m just really, really fucking sorry.”

He glances at Tyson, who’s staring really hard at his feet. JT feels like he might puke. His whole body is tangled up in shame and sadness and embarrassment.

“This sucks, I’m sorry,” JT says, to kill the silence. “This is so much. It’s too much to put on you, I can go.”

Tyson stays quiet, so JT bites down hard on the inside of his cheek to keep a straight face and stands up to leave.

“You didn’t fuck it up that bad,” Tyson says quietly.

“What?” says JT, freezing.

“You don’t have to beat yourself up over this.”

JT sits back down.

“I don’t know what I’m doing either, really,” Tyson says. The streetlights come on above their heads with a low buzz. “But I know that I like you, and I want you to be happy.”

“I want the same thing,” JT says. “For you, I mean.” The bird JT was watching earlier is gone now. He didn’t see it fly away. “And for me, I guess.” It’s weird for JT to think about his own happiness. In his past experience it’s been easier to avoid than to look at it head on. Like if he thought about it too much he would be too happy or not happy enough, or he would just notice that he wasn’t feeling anything at all, and that made him nervous so he didn’t think about it.

“I want both of us to be happy,” Tyson says. “So now we know our goals are, like, aligned. That’s a start.”

JT nods. “It sure is.”

The sun has mostly gone down, and it’s getting quieter and darker all around their bench. JT looks down at his legs next to Tyson’s legs, and then looks up at the sky. He’s not a hundred percent sure, but he thinks he might see a satellite tracking by above all the trees and buildings.

“I feel like now is a good time to say that I like you too. And I’d be down to kiss you again, if I didn’t scare you off the first time.” JT looks over at Tyson again. He’s shivering, but smiling. He doesn’t look scared. JT is kind of scared, and he probably looks it. But he said it all out loud, and he and Tyson are both still sitting there. The earth is still spinning.

Tyson laughs softly in a cloud of white. “I’m really, really, glad to hear that.”

There’s more people walking past them on the street now. It must be around the time that five o’clock classes are getting out, although JT doesn’t know how that much time has passed. Wordlessly, JT reaches out and grabs Tyson’s hand. His fingers are ice cold, but the longer JT holds on to them the warmer they get.

“It’s cold as shit out here,” JT says. “Let’s go inside.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> this started out as a goofy story inspired by a school-sponsored drag ball i went to once and then became a very serious project with No Jokes and now it is neither of those things and also twice as long as i thought it would be, and it took me three years to write!
> 
> everything i wrote about astronomy i learned in 9th grade science and by google image searching "telescope."
> 
> come say hey on [tumblr](https://softbarrie.tumblr.com/)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Interplanetary Fall](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20551259) by [Annapods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annapods/pseuds/Annapods)




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